Raphael Abramovitch 1880-1963
Raphael Abramovitch 1880-1963 The pages of the daily newspaper tell us of the "swift pace" of History. Each page overwhelms us with the rush of multifarious events. It is all the more...
...Many men know now, in hindsight, how and why the October Revolution had to go along its grotesque course...
...The single theme of the book, harking back to the "academic debates" between the Socialist factions in 1906, is that a revolution made by a minority party can only end in the ruthless dictatorship of that party and the tyranny of a single man...
...Raphael Abramovitch Rein was born in 1880 in Dvinsk, Latvia, then as now under Russian rule...
...As a number of Socialists got up and began to push their way out of the crowded hall, Trotsky, the military organizer of the insurrection, stood up...
...The debates that took place that night were punctuated by the roar of the cannons of the Peter-Paul Fortress firing on the Winter Palace...
...In 1920...
...On the fateful night of October 25, when the Bolsheviks began their insurrection in Petrograd, the Second Congress of the All-Russian Soviets—which still comprised all the Socialist parties—convened in the Smolny Institute...
...He matriculated at the Riga Polytechnical Institute as a student of mechanical engineering, but was expelled in 1901 for revolutionary activities...
...who would have been S3 this July, was for more than 40 years the acknowledged leader of the Russian Social Democratic (Menshevik) party...
...the other, devoted to maintaining the international labor and Socialist movement steadfast in its democratic, anti-Communist purpose...
...Martov and Abramovitch, speaking for the Menshevik Internationalists, warned that unless the Bolsheviks created a new government acceptable to all the revolutionary Socialist parties, civil war was bound to ensue...
...He lived to see it published, and acclaimed, especially in England, before he died...
...Henryk Erlich, speaking for the Bund, urged the Social Democrats to leave and to join in the defense of the Provisional Government...
...Such are the ironies for those who claim to speak on behalf of History...
...In 1923, he was one of the founders of the Labor and Socialist International...
...That their voices were not heard in time is an equally great tragedy...
...In that year, too, he became a columnist for the Jewish Daily Forward, to which he contributed regularly until his death...
...the Communists sought to blacken his name by charging, in the first Moscow frame-up trials, that he had secretly visited the Soviet Union to plot against the regime—during a time when Abramovitch was actually in Brussels attending a meeting of the Labor and Socialist International...
...Few were able to know before, however...
...The entire life of Abramovitch—and of his movement—was an assertion of that right to judge: by the moral criteria which impelled him to devote all his energies to the ending of exploitation and injustice...
...With a pale, cruel face, letting out his voice in rich contempt," as John Reed described him, Trotsky then uttered the classic anathema which was to mock him the rest of his life: "All these so-called Socialist compromisers, these frightened Mensheviki, Socialist Revolutionaries, Bund—let them go...
...One of the cruel aspects of our own time is that so many malevolent acts are done in the name of History, on the premise that History will judge, as if men forfeit the right, here and now, to say what is right or wrong...
...B. *In the Petrograd newspapers of the following day, Erlich's speech was mistakenly attributed to Abramovitch...
...together with Julius Martov, Abramovitch went abroad as the head of a Menshevik delegation...
...The remainder of his life was spent in exile in Germany, France and...
...From 1901 to 1908 he made his living by teaching physics and mathematics at a Hochschule in Vilna, and, when forced to go abroad from 1908 to 1917, by examining technical claims in a patent office in Vienna...
...But it was a life of ceaseless political activity: one part devoted to the effort to keep alive the Menshevik voice through the Sotsialistichesky Vestnik ("The Socialist Courier"), which has been published continuously since 1921...
...Although he became active in the Jewish Labor Bund, and was its delegate to the Russian Social Democratic party, Abramovitch (dropping the family name in public affairs) was never a "professional revolutionary...
...In 1931...
...It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that until April 11 we had among us a witness of the most extraordinary event of our time, the Russian Revolution...
...the book now stands as his political testament as well...
...Yet a savage revenge was wreaked on him: In 1937, his only son, Mark Rein, who was serving in the International Brigade in Spain, was kidnapped and slain by the CPU in Barcelona...
...and by the theoretical criteria of socialist thought...
...for the last 20 years, in the United States...
...They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of history...
...At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in February 1917, Abramovitch returned quickly to Russia and was elected to the Petrograd Soviet, where he became, together with Martov, the leader of the "Internationalist" (or anti - wax) wing of the Menshevik party...
...That the Mensheviks were able to make such an assessment is History's greatest tribute to Democratic Socialism...
...The mistake was taken from the press, made a part of the official minutes of the Second Congress, and subsequently repeated by Reed in his Ten Days That Shook the World...
...Abramovitch was continually engaged in the task of redressing the falsification of History...
...Four years ago, Abramovitch undertook to write a history of the Communist regime, The Soviet Revolution...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 9
